How to Buy Cold Email Domains Across Registrars and Client Accounts

Why one registrar account is a single point of failure

Registrars act on abuse reports. Cold email draws them, from recipients, from spam traps and from blocklist operators, and the registrar does not see the difference between your fleet and a spammer’s. Namecheap is the one operators name most often for suspending cold email domains, sometimes a whole account at once, but every registrar has an acceptable use policy and every one of them can close an account. If that account holds all of your domains, or all of every client’s, one review takes out every campaign you run.

The registrar is not the only thing that groups your domains. In our SURBL study of 2,817 domains, listings followed patterns in how the domains were bought and hosted rather than how they sent. Two of those patterns are about buying:

• •Bulk registration, grouped on a shared keyword. Fresh registrations appear to be read off public WHOIS and grouped by batch and by the word the names share. Three of ours with one token in common were listed together.
• •Shared nameserver zones. Domains sitting in the same DNS zone as thousands of others appear to be treated as neighbours, so contamination spreads through the zone.

The cost of buying in bulk shows in the totals: 26.9% of the domains we built ourselves were listed, against 63.0% of the stock we had bought in from resellers. Read the full study before deciding what a listing means for you; in the same data, reply rates on newly listed domains barely moved.

Spread across registrars, and know who owns what

The trick I use is Spaceship, because it is cheap, fast and has a clean interface for buying in volume. I run about twenty Spaceship accounts. But be clear about what that buys you: Spaceship was built by the team behind Namecheap and sits in the same group. They are separately accredited registrars, so a Namecheap decision does not close a Spaceship account, but they are not unrelated companies.

So treat many Spaceship accounts as protection against one account being closed, and put part of the fleet with a registrar outside that group too: Porkbun, Cloudflare Registrar or Dynadot. A split we like is no more than about half the fleet with any one group, and no single account holding more than one client’s domains.

One account per client

For an agency, the account boundary should be the client boundary. It pays off three ways:

• •A smaller blast radius. A suspension or a billing dispute on one client’s account stops that client’s campaigns, not everyone’s.
• •A clean handover. When a client leaves or wants to own their domains, you hand over or transfer one account rather than picking their domains out of a shared one.
• •Separate billing. Each account’s renewals map to one client, so you can rebill them without a spreadsheet of who owns which domain.

The same separation belongs in the sequencer, the suppression lists and the mailboxes; the agency client data guide covers the rest of it.

The plus-addressing trick for creating accounts

Twenty registrar accounts sounds like twenty mailboxes to check. It is one. Google Workspace supports plus addressing: mail sent to [email protected] is delivered to [email protected]. To a registrar, each variant is a different email address and a different account.

• •[email protected]: the first account
• •[email protected], [email protected]: numbered accounts for batches of domains
• •[email protected]: one account per client, named so you can tell them apart at a glance

Every verification email, renewal notice and abuse report lands in your one inbox, and Gmail shows the full address it was sent to, so a filter per tag sorts each account’s mail into its own label.

Where it needs care

• •Some sign-up forms reject the plus sign. For those, add a Workspace alias or a Google Group address instead; both deliver to the same inbox.
• •Use the client’s own address where the client owns the domains. If a client will take the account over, register it to an address they control, or plan the handover from the start.
• •Turn on two-factor authentication for every account and keep the logins in a team password manager, not a spreadsheet. Twenty accounts are twenty ways in.
• •Accounts are linkable. The same card, IP address and contact details tie them together for a registrar that looks. That is fine; the aim is that one account closing does not close the rest, not that the registrar cannot see you.

Buy five at a time, then wait 30 minutes

A brand-new account that checks out forty domains in its first hour looks exactly like the fraud and abuse pattern registrars screen for. At best the order is held for verification; at worst the account is closed before a single domain resolves. So I buy about five domains per account, wait about 30 minutes, and buy the next five, moving between accounts as I go.

The pause does a second job. Registration times are public, and a block of domains registered in the same minute is a batch anyone reading WHOIS can see. Spreading purchases across accounts, registrars and the day makes the batch harder to draw a line around.

Generic names still need all of this

Naming is the first defence. Names with no token in common give a blocklist nothing to group on, and that naming rule is the main reason our own pools stayed cleaner in the study. But a generic name only removes the keyword. The account, the batch, the payment and the nameserver zone are still there to group on, so spread them too. A few more habits that cost nothing:

• •No sequential names. getacme1.com, getacme2.com is one domain in a blocklist’s eyes.
• •WHOIS privacy on every domain. Most registrars include it free; a public registrant name ties the fleet together in one search.
• •Spread DNS as well as registrars. Several Cloudflare accounts, or a paid DNS host for part of the fleet, so no one zone holds a meaningful share of it. The bulk nameserver checker groups a pasted list by the zone each domain resolves through, and the bulk Cloudflare DNS guide sets up records across a fleet.
• •Do not point the fleet at one site. Redirecting hundreds of domains to your main domain is another pattern from the same study, and the main domain was listed with them.

Keep an inventory

Twenty accounts across three registrars is unmanageable from memory. Keep one sheet with a row per domain: the domain, its registrar, the account email (with its plus tag), the client, where its DNS is hosted, the mailboxes on it, and its renewal date. Missed renewals are how a working domain quietly disappears, and the domain expiry checker reads the registration and expiry dates for a pasted list so you can fill that column in one go. Run the bulk SURBL checker over the same list now and then, so a listing is something you know about rather than something you find out.

Or have it done for you

Spreading the estate across many accounts and zones is how we build every fleet we deliver. Every order of Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 inboxes includes a free prewarmed domain, named generically and set up the same way, so that part of the work is already done. If you would rather buy your own, the method above is the one we use.